


Soldier

by Sabaxoxoxo



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Brain Damage, Car Accidents, F/M, This is my first try you guys so please go easy on me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 04:57:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20576837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sabaxoxoxo/pseuds/Sabaxoxoxo
Summary: A glimpse into the life-altering aftermath of a car accident that leaves Claire with a brain injury and Jamie powerless to help.





	Soldier

Jamie peered at his wife’s perfect porcelain skin as she slept, gleaming in the soft blue light from the lamppost outside their bedroom window. Her face was peaceful, serene, and her soft breath fluttered the wisps of hair resting on her cheeks. He reached over slowly and brushed the curls off of her face with his middle finger, careful not to touch her skin, lest he wake her. She tired easily these days, and needed her sleep.

//

He thought back to the day (was it already two months ago?) when he had watched her sleep in a hospital bed. The air had been punctuated with the beeps and whirs of the machines she was hooked up to. She wore a hospital gown that looked so out of place on her, inorganic and foreign. She hadn’t been sleeping then, not in the way she was now. She had been in an induced coma. The doctors said it was routine, to help control patients post-injury. She had lost consciousness after the accident, but once she was stabilized at the hospital and began waking up, they had administered the drug to put her back to sleep.

"She is confused, in pain and scared," one of the many doctors filing in and out of Claire's room had explained to Jamie. "It will be easier to perform all the immediate procedures while she is out."

He had stared at her for five agonizing hours as he waited for her to come back to consciousness, watching how each light breath caused her chest to swell minutely before deflating again. And then suddenly, her eyes had fluttered open, the same way they’d done every morning for the last five years they’d woken up next to each other, and Jamie swore he had felt butterflies in his stomach, as if they were back at university and she’d smiled at him from across the cafeteria. She blinked blearily a few times trying to focus her eyes, until they rolled to the left, as if by their own accord, and landed on his. It took all of Jamie’s strength not to jump onto the bed, wrap his arms around her and crush her to his chest, promising her that he’d never let go. At the same time he bit back the urge to scold her for being stupid enough to check her phone while driving, knowing that she had probably checked to see if he had texted. He hadn’t.

Instead, he leaned over and touched the back of her hand resting on the bed beside her, slowly trailing the pads of his fingers across her knuckles. She looked pallid and so, so frail. Where the usual rosy flush on the highest points of her cheeks should have been, the skin was littered with a nasty criss-cross of cuts. Her naturally pouty lips now sagged a little on the left, weighed down by a neat row of small stitches. Claire’s glassy eyes peered into Jamie’s, but it was as if she didn’t see him, had no name for him. And it was that helpless, terrified, lost look in her eyes that broke James Fraser's heart; on the day his wife suffered a brain injury from a motor vehicle accident and woke up not knowing him. It felt like a cold, dull crack deep to his sternum, robbing him of his ability to breathe and his will to live.

She knew him now. It had been eight weeks, and since then many of the immediate effects had faded, as the doctors said they would. But they also said some of the damage was irreversible, and she would live impaired for the rest of her life. He sometimes felt like screaming, frustrated with how little he could do to help her, to fix her; and then he thought of how much more frustrated Claire must feel.

She could no longer walk steadily; she’d lost the dexterity in her delicate, long fingers, and stuttered through simple sentences because she couldn’t manipulate her mouth and throat in the way she wanted to. She was still sharp as a tack — she knew exactly what had happened to her, comprehended perfectly the effects of the injury and the ways in which her life would be altered; she was a doctor, for God’s sake. But that did nothing to soothe the frustration she felt when she couldn’t place the toothpaste onto her toothbrush properly, couldn’t articulate the vividness of the thoughts bursting in her mind.

The doctors at the hospital, some of them Claire’s colleagues, had told them that she had been lucky. The damage had occurred when she had fallen forcefully back onto her seat after being violently bounced upward when the car had tumbled into a ditch at the side of the road. Her brain had been pushed into the base of her skull and her vertebrae, bruising the cerebellum. And yet, apparently she was lucky, because despite the cuts and bruises — the slight bleeding in her brain and loss of consciousness and memory around the accident — most of Claire remained intact. She still had difficulty maintaining her attention on daily activities and had poor memory for things like what she’d had for breakfast, or what they would do on the weekend, but overall Jamie knew that Claire Beauchamp Fraser was still the mastermind she had always been. It was only her rigid, jerky movements that gave her away, and her speech, that had her concentrating — sometimes to the point of closing her eyes — to bite the words out of her mouth.

//

As Jamie gazed at his beautiful, intelligent, fierce wife, sleeping away the tiredness from a day in which she had done but a fraction the things she used to fill her days with, his heart broke for what felt like the thousandth time in the last two months, as a lone tear leaked from the side of Claire’s eye and plopped onto the pillow. She didn’t really express sadness about the injury; she was more frustrated and angry, as was usually the case when highly intelligent, independent people suddenly found themselves dependent on others. And yet, as she slept, she cried. From the loss, the pain, the hopelessness, Jamie didn’t know, but he felt the deep sting in his gut as another tear spread across her lash line.

//

A few weeks after Claire’s accident, the doctors had recommended she undertake some neuropsychological testing to uncover the exact deficits they would be dealing with in rehabilitation. The physical effects were already known, and hard to miss. Of course, Jamie had planned on spending his entire life with Claire from the moment he’d first seen her, and had known since then that they would grow old together, perhaps lean on one another when they grew too old to walk alone. What he hadn’t expected was to watch his 27-year-old wife struggle to walk ten paces down the hospital corridor without pausing for breath from the sheer effort it took to force her legs to take one step after another.

They tested her in a small office. Claire sat at the table while the doctor set up the booklets and equipment that would tell them whether her memory was affected — if she could plan and organize, whether her attentional abilities had been compromised. Once the doctor was organised, she had looked expectantly up at Jamie, standing beside Claire.  
“Alright, we’ll see you back here in an hour or so, Mr. Fraser. We shouldn’t be much longer than that.” She smiled at him.  
“I’ll stay, thank ye.” Jamie shook his head.  
“Actually, it’s better for Claire if it’s just her and I in the room. Sometimes the presence of others can interrupt optimal performance, you understand,” she explained.  
He did understand, but then Claire turned and Jamie saw fear in her eyes. A fear that had doused the fires that usually burned on the surface of her irises and left them flaxen and exhausted. She was scared. She knew the medical system; she worked in it, and knew that these tests couldn’t hurt her. Yet she was terrified at what the tests might reveal; of finding out just how much damage she had incurred.

So Jamie shook his head again, firmly. Claire didn’t want him to leave, and so he would stay.  
“Mr. Fraser, the standardization procedure recommends that patients are alone during testing. You can wait right outside, and come back in whenever we have a break,” the doctor reassured brightly.  
“The procedure can go hang,” he replied tersely, “I willna leave her side.”

In the end, the doctor had allowed him to stay, perhaps making a consideration because Claire had been (was _still_ technically) a doctor at this hospital, or perhaps because the doctor didn’t want to fight with an incredibly large and protective Scot.

So he stayed, but it was hard. Jamie watched as his canny, clever wife struggled through the tasks. She could remember the lists of words the doctor read out to her — he knew she could. Where she struggled was getting them out, saying them. She knew exactly how to draw the complex geometric designs the doctor asked her to copy, but she couldn’t hold the pencil properly. She couldn’t transfer her intentions into actions. Claire wobbled and shook and made a few scribbling attempts at drawing lines on the page before putting the pencil down, grinding her teeth and jerkily wiping the beads of sweat that had formed on her upper lip.

Jamie gaped at the astonishing dignity with which she gave up, knowing it was not a matter of trying harder — that part of her brilliant brain just did not work any longer. The pencil rolled a bit before coming to stop at the edge of the table. Seeing the pencil there, next to a small mound of pencil sharpenings, reminded Jamie distinctly of when Claire was still in medical school, when the permanent smell of wooden pencils and strong coffee hung in the air just above their heads in their living room. She always studied at the coffee table, with her books and papers scattered across the table, couch, floor and any other horizontal surface she could find. Her riotous curls were always strangled in a tight bun on top of her head. She had developed a habit of chewing gum while she studied — said it helped her think — and would periodically blow bubbles and pop them while making flashcards and testing herself. Jamie, sitting on the couch, watching TV with the sound muted, would pretend to be irritated by it (“do ye have to keep doing that, Sassenach?”), when really, the quiet, intermittent pops of strawberry bubblegum told him that she was there, she was near. He wondered if she wanted gum now, if it would help her think while she did these tests.

They had been sent home after a few weeks at the hospital, when the external injuries had healed and those that hadn’t had been cloaked in mild reassurance and patient understanding from the doctors and nurses at the hospital. A few days after they had settled back at home, Jamie suggested Claire plant the herbs she’d brought home from the nursery about a month ago, but never got around to planting. It seemed a good idea to keep her distracted, and she had always enjoyed gardening before. She sat in the soil, jeans smeared with grass and dirt stains at the knees and specks of pollen hovering around her and settling in her hair. From where Jamie sat on the porch steps, she looked like a faerie on a dun, with the mid-afternoon sunlight bathing her in an amber glow. Claire tremulously shoved her trowel into the soil to make a hole to plant the herbs. But her wrist jerked on the up-movement, overshooting the motion required to move the soil, and a handful of dirt sprang up in an arc and landed like rain on her face, hair and lap.

Jamie laughed. He hadn’t meant to, but it spilled right out of him like dropped marbles, and before he could stop himself or cover it with a cough, Claire’s head swung around and fixed him with an indignant glare. He hadn’t laughed at her, of course not! His heart had not stopped aching for her since the day of the accident, and he felt her frustration constantly, and yet, her clumsy action with the trowel was so typical of the old Claire. She could be awkward at times, and Jamie had always enjoyed teasing her about it. She would usually feign annoyance for a bit, tossing back retorts (“mind your own business, _James_,” and “the plate was _slippery_! That’s why I dropped it,” or “why don’t you just go fuck yourself?” in the poshest accent she could muster, to which he dutifully replied “but then there’d be nothin’ for you to do Sassenach”), before joining Jamie in his laughter. And so it felt perfectly natural to laugh at the smudges of dirt that now streaked her face like war paint.

His warrior.

And she was. She had lost both her parents, and the uncle who had raised her afterwards. She had made it through seven years of the most gruelling classes to become a doctor. She had been beaten, wounded, and struck with such force when her car crashed that her brain had been damaged beyond the point of repair. And she had fucking survived.

But just as Jamie began to apologize profusely, Claire’s mouth quivered, and then curled into a small grin. She remembered those clumsy, old-Claire moments too. Jamie stood and galloped down the porch steps to join her in the soil.  
“Here, let me help ye with that, _mo chridhe_,” he said gently, taking the trowel from her stained fingers. Claire smiled up at him gratefully and murmured a soft “thank you.”  
They had worked through the afternoon, and even though Jamie’s too-bulky fingers crushed the delicate leaves of the herbs, it was the first time since the accident that he and Claire had breathed easy, with the thyme-spritzed air singing in their nostrils and clinging to their clothes.

//

Suddenly, Claire’s eyelids flicked open, and the low light in their bedroom waltzed on the surface of her whisky eyes.  
“Jamie,” she whispered shakily, her hand reaching out from under the covers and landing on his cheek, as if in slow motion, with a thump. They stared into one another’s eyes for a long while, breathing into each other’s mouths.

“Iloveyou,” she said after a moment, in one breath but in one, smooth sentence — no stuttering, no pauses. And Jamie could have sworn he heard violins swell in his ears and saw fireworks burst in his eyes. Despite the constant struggle in speaking, moving, eating, and even resting that now plagued the ‘new’ Claire, those words (the ones that mattered most), came easy; slid right over her lips like water flows over pebbles in a burn. Her voice was shrouded in sleep and had a feathery cadence that made Jamie want to fall to his knees and weep, thanking God for putting him on an Earth where this woman, his Claire, loved him.

“I love ye too, _mo ghraidh_,” he replied, smiling widely through the little dams of tears held by his eyelids, threatening to break at any moment. He scooted closer to her, one arm reaching under and around her waist, the other moving to the end of her braid, which he had done for her before they’d gone to bed. One handed, he disentangled the interlaced curls and fanned them out before threading his fingers into them and holding on to the back of her head, careful not to touch the scars from the stiches. He hooked his leg over her hips and pulled all four of his limbs towards himself, bringing her closer still, enveloping her completely. Claire burrowed her head into his bare chest, and he felt his heart beat powerfully against her forehead. A moment later, the gentle, almost imperceptible touch of her velvet-soft lips pressed over Jamie’s heart. He snaked a hand down between them and held her chin between his thumb and forefinger, slowly tilting her head up so their eyes could meet. Then, with the same softness with which Claire had kissed him, Jamie placed his lips on Claire’s and kissed her — once, then again — before drawing her in tighter against his body, almost rolling on top of her. He slid his fingers down the long column of her throat, across her clavicles, and over the ivory dune of her breast. His thumb stroked lazy arcs on her side as he kissed the tip of her nose, her cupid’s bow, and then her lips again.

He would be her armour, Jamie told himself. He would never let anything harm her. Yet, even as he tried to convince himself that he could protect her for all eternity, he knew that what was hurting Claire was inside of her. He could not protect her from that; he could only offer her the fortification of the truth — the only one that mattered. “I love ye, _mo nighean donn_. I love ye tonight, and every night. Every version of ye. Ye are the love of all my lifetimes. I love ye, Claire.” He repeated, until her breath evened and she fell back asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Endless love to @smashingteacups for encouraging me to write, betaing, correcting my countless grammatical errors and being an extraordinarily supportive friend. Thank you darling!


End file.
